Consumer product manufacturers have historically provided the customer with various options for the look and feel of consumer products to allow the customer to purchase a product which meets his or her own sense of style. Under such circumstances, the consumer product, although functioning in substantially the same way for all persons, can be personalized to some degree to suit the customer's tastes.
Recently, this type of personalization has begun to be offered to purchasers of computers and other electronic devices. By way of example, several mobile telephone manufacturers provide a variety of different colored faceplates that can be removably snapped onto the purchased mobile telephone so that the customer can personalize the look of his or her telephone. To cite another example, the iMac™ computer produced by Apple Computer, Inc. is available in various different colors which the user may choose.
Personalization is also now available, albeit to a limited extent, for various software applications. For instance, most Windows™ operating systems allow the user to alter the look and feel of the user's desktop by selecting various color schemes, background patterns, etc. In addition, several Windows™ applications (e.g., Microsoft Word™) permit the user to select which onscreen “toolbars” and/or “buttons” are displayed to the user. Other examples of software personalization can be found online. For example, Yahoo!™ provides a service called “My Yahoo!” with which users can create their own “customized” home pages. With this service, the user can not only select color schemes for the home page but further can select what content (e.g., news, sports scores, stock market indices, travel information, weather) is presented to the user on the page.
Such software personalization is valuable to many users in that it permits the users to customize their software interfaces to suit their own sense of style and to tailor the interface to their personal needs. Unfortunately, this type of personalization is not currently provided in the electrical device interface context. Instead, purchasers of electrical devices (e.g., printers, copiers, scanners, digital cameras, etc.) that can be controlled with another device (e.g., personal computer) are normally provided with static user interfaces that cannot be modified. Even if such personalization where available for device interfaces, however, the limited nature of the types of personalization currently available would do little to customize the interfaces beyond mere aesthetics.